Primer Courses in Innovation, Intra and Entrepreneurship

Needs have evolved over the past 40 years and engineering builders have become engineering creators. The objective pursued by UTC therefore is to provide its students with the right tools to take part in the dynamics of our innovative times: they must be able to adapt to new situations, to be able to work in groups, to communicate efficiently, to have a mastery in several languages and know how to assume positions of responsibility …

Introduction

The entrepreneurial world is also fully integrated into the UTC training policy scheme. By proposing projects to the students and participating in the credit courses as external lecturers, they benefit from emulation amongst companies and get better insights in the riches of innovation.

UTC trains 'general graduate engineers' who possess the capacity to be autonomous, show initiative, assume responsibilities and engage in team work in complex project situations, in an increasingly international environment.

Throughout their study period at UTC, students choose credit courses or specific modules that are accessible to all branch specialties (and also in the continuous education programmes) and this range of courses allows them to be trained in intra and entre-preneurship skills.

UTC prepares each and every student to become an 'entrepreneur' in relation to his (or her) personal professional objectives, plus their personal and citizen aims.

Credit courses and MPI specialty

Each university credit course corresponds to the quantity of work needed (100–150h) to attain a target set of skills in a semester. The CCs are organized at the UTC Innovation Centre, so as to encourage and enhance exchanges and meetings between students, lecturer-scientists and representatives of the entrepreneurial world.

CC – On management and aids to industrial creativity and innovation

This CC addresses the following themes: knowledge capitalization, knowledge and know-how, skills, strategic monitoring, technological assessments, industrial property rights … The objective of this credit course is to see the students undertake an industrial project – either by coming with an initial idea(s) or finding one in the first three weeks of the course.

CC – Management and marketing innovation

Those companies who are partners to UTC for this CC give the students real-life cases to investigate and on the basis of which they proceed with an analysis of the environment leading to a decision to place a product/service on the market-place. Numerous questions and issues are addressed: how do you identify and characterize new opportunities in a given environment and how do you assess the potential of a given product/service deemed to be innovative …

Some examples of student projects:

Groupe Soufflet : Marketing Analysis of Biotech. Services
Bouygues Construction : The Seine-Nord Canal Project: Potential and Valorisation of Territories crossed en route
Microsoft : Marketing Strategy and Action Plans for the launch of the Open XML product

CC – Initiation to the creation of innovative companies

This CC aims at creating a (virtual) enterprise on the basis of a product deemed to be innovative and to draw up a business plan. The students work in groups, develop an idea to become a product or a service and pursue to the creation of the (virtual) company.

CC – Economic intelligence: corporate strategy, the approaches and the tools

The concept of economic intelligence covers all activities related to management of strategic information, both in respect to access and data protection. In the framework of this CC, the objective is to come to grips with the challenges when using "EI" in entrepreneurial situations for UTC's future manager graduates. Initiating them to the practice and concepts that underpin EI allows for a better understanding of the changing, competitive environment of the business world: globalization, data driven society, leverage systems, collective, international R&D …

CC – Project management

The objective of this CC is to prepare student-engineers to become efficient project 'actors', (i.e., managers), representing their specialties in a team structure and to master the specifics of project management, as head of project. This area enables various resources to be mustered as needed to implement innovative, non-repetitive, activities in an enterprise (design and launching of a new product, installing a new process, carrying out a specific action on product quality assessment or in cost control), with results that are far superior to those obtained by a classic function-oriented organization.

The specialty 'Management of Innovative Projects' (MPI) allows the students to acquire new knowledge and skills whereby they can more readily integrate the socio-cultural context (in which all enterprises operate) to their techno-scientific training at Compiegne.

In taking the MPI specialty course, future UTC graduate engineers will become an 'interface actor' between marketing, research, development, project management, economic and budgetary management, work methods, industrialization, data processing systems, manpower resources… of an enterprise evolving in a complex world of today's human societies.

Teaching is based on a training/action approach. The students are invited to implement their new knowledge and skills in the framework of large-scale, difficult projects conducted in close co-operation with the UTC industrial partners.

› More than 1 500 projects have been completed since the MPI elective specialty opened, with:

SNECMA: Technological watchtower monitoring for micro-drilling process on high-pressure turbine blades (for the nuclear sector at the CEA)
the KineHaptic Project: Technological watchtower monitoring (technologies and patents) for 'robotised' rehabilitation programmes
AIK: Capitalization and Knowledge acquirement for LED fitted lighting equipment
AREVA T D: Technological watchtower monitoring for graphic digital display tools

Action (and reflection) – intensive project workshops (AP)

UTC has decided to turn its students to actors-engineers during their university training, offering Project workshops (acronym in French AP) where the pedagogy is based on 'real life' case studies in enterprises and/or local authorities.

There is a prime contractor for each Project, whether it be a local authority, a public establishment or a private company who wish a study to be undertaken on a given theme.

These Project workshops allow future graduate engineers to reason and take into account the different points of view of different persons who co-existent in an enterprise and also take into account the risks for the personnel as of the product design phase and also allow the enterprises themselves to come, up with new viable solutions to their production problems.

In the same light as the internships and end-of-course projects, the Project workshops represent a real, positive bonus on the UTC graduate's CV, underscoring their proximity with the entrepreneurial world.

Elective Minors in technology entrepreneuship training' sic

Courses in Technology and Social sciences is one of the 'trade-marks' of UTC training and they can be taken further via the so-called minor electives. There is a block of specific CCs that enable the future UTC engineers to acquire a second specialty that value adds to their main specialty sector and will be inscribed on their diploma accordingly.

UTC has created an elective minor entitled Intensive Entrepreneur Training (sic), acronym UTC IntEnT, that targets the student engineers who wish to develop a personal project during their stay at the University. UTC IntEnT with its specific pedagogy allows students to co-manage their basic engineering courses and the 'entrepreneur' elective, with the offer of a set of ad hoc arrangements: re-arranged schedules, adapted, complementary training, an accompaniment to "Team management skills" and an individual monitoring including a better knowledge of 'oneself', with a direct liaison with the UTC Sport Elite section.

In a highly competitive environment, the pressure in both innovation and export activities are key factors for the SMEs and require that the latter possess adaptable, daring, skills, to the world outside and different forms of thinking, cultures, learning processes, organization and action. SMEs must be able to assert their difference to ensure their commercial survival.

They must aim at producing new and innovative products (products, services), controlling the factor of upstream customer satisfaction (Design Thinking), learning to control their environment and their capacity to seize opportunities (economic and strategic intelligence), to define their export business plan, represent the range of factors conducive to guaranteeing the success of the company.

The InnovENT‑E minor elective is a training module that is proposed by the 3 French Universities of technology (UTC-Compiegne, UTBM-Belfort-Montbeliard and UTT-Troyes) under the certified label "InnovENT‑E", with the objective to develop innovative and international skills in the SME milieu. The CCs attached to the module can be followed in distant learning modes.

The aim of this elective minor is to enable students to develop a global reaching vision of organizations and corporate strategy in international affairs.

Among the professional openings for this course, we have the 'expats', work in French or foreign multinational groups, access to specialist master's degrees in economics and/or management.

Continuous education courses

If the enterprises are interested, they can have their personnel trained in innovation:

the InnovENT‑E Institute proposes continuous education training modules for SMEs on the theme: "Supporting innovation in enterprises to win over new export market sectors and contracts".
UTC also proposes a university engineering diploma in 'Accompaniment for Innovative Projects'. This diploma targets professional personnel who may wish to train in and reinforce their expertise in the field of accompaniment of innovative processed and projects (incubators, nurseries, competitivity poles and the European Community Business and Innovation Centres (EC BIC).